Calypso(35)

I grew up in the suburbs of Raleigh, North Carolina, so didn’t see a fox until I moved to France in 1998. There were plenty of them in Normandy, and every so often I’d come upon one, usually at dusk. It was hard to get a good look at them, since they’d run the moment they saw me, not as if they were frightened but as if they were guilty. This had to do with their heads, the way they were hanging, and their eyes, which were watchful but at the same time averted.

In Sussex too, foxes are common, though most of the ones I come upon are dead—hit by cars and rotting by the side of the road. The first time Hugh and I visited the area in 2010, we stayed with our friends Viv and Gretchen, who live in the village of Sutton. They’d roasted a chicken for dinner, and when we finished eating Viv threw the carcass into the yard. “For whoever wants it,” he said.

When we got our own house, not far from theirs, we started doing the same thing: tossing our bones into the meadow our backyard opens onto. Whatever we put out vanishes by morning, but who or what took it is anyone’s guess. We have badgers, but, as with foxes, you’re more apt to come across them dead than alive. Occasionally I’ll see a hedgehog on our property—Galveston, his name is—and there’s no shortage of deer and partridge. We have pheasant and stoats and so many rabbits that in the spring and summer it looks as if our house is the backdrop for an Easter commercial.



One of the reasons I don’t want a cat is that it will kill our wildlife. My brother has to change his doormat every two months—that’s how much his savages drag home—and my sister Gretchen’s are just as bad. She’s forever returning from work to find a chipmunk on her sofa, its head chewed to a paste, or a bird that’s not quite dead flapping the stump that used to be a wing against her blood-spattered kitchen floor.

Another argument against pets—at least for Hugh and me—are the fights they lead to. In the midnineties we got two cats, the last of thirty owned by the actress Sandy Dennis, who had recently died of ovarian cancer and who had lived in a house in Connecticut that, on a summer day, you could smell from our apartment in SoHo. Angel and Barratos were black with white spots, both short-haired. We changed their names to Sandy and Dennis, and from the day they entered our lives until the day they died, Hugh and I fought over how to feed and care for them.

I’m of the “Let’s-fatten-you-up-until-you’re-too-obese-to-do-much-of-anything” school, while he’s more practical, or “mean,” as I’m apt to call it. “You don’t know what it’s like, living in a small apartment day and night with nothing to look forward to,” I used to say. “All they live for is food, so why not give it to them?”

This “healthy pet” nonsense—I just don’t buy it. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gone to a neighbor with a bag of leftovers, only to be told that their dog doesn’t “do” table scraps. And bones—no way. “He could choke!”

These are the same people who avoid canned food in favor of dry nuggets that remain in the bowl, ignored, for days at a time but are, I’m told, “so-o-o-o-o much better for him than that other stuff.”

I once knew someone in New York who insisted that his black Lab was a vegetarian.

“Just like you,” I said. “Gosh, what a coincidence!”

When the dog charged after a hamburger someone had dropped on the sidewalk outside a McDonald’s on Eighth Avenue, he was, I guess, just going after the pickle.

Then there are all the behavioral arguments that joint pet ownership leads to: “Don’t let her jump up on the table/countertop/stereo,” etc. As if you can stop a cat from going where she likes. That’s why you want them fifteen pounds overweight. It keeps them lower to the ground.

Sandy was old and died a year after we got her. We brought Dennis to France when we left New York and shuttled him between the house in Normandy and the apartment in Paris. This led to regular fights over how to get him into his cat carrier, and how often to let him outside. When he died, we fought over where to bury him, and how deep.

All I can say is: Thank God we never had children.

We even fight about the creatures I drag home—things I find, most often, on my walks and wrap up in a handkerchief. They’re usually mice or shrews, already doomed, though not by anything obvious: They haven’t been run over. There are never any teeth marks on them. Perhaps they’re diseased or just too old to run away from me.

“You’re not giving it croutons, are you?” Hugh will say.

“‘It’ is named Canfield, and I’m not forcing him to eat anything,” I’ll answer, dropping what will look like a fistful of dice into the terrarium or, if that’s already in use as a hospice for some dying toad or vole, my backup bucket. “They’re just there if he wants them.”



Onto this battleground, Carol arrived. “It’s the funniest thing,” Hugh said one evening in mid-July. “I had the kitchen door open earlier and this little fox walked by, looked in at me, and continued on her way. Not running, not in any hurry. She looks to me like she might be named Carol.”

The next afternoon I threw a steak bone into the pasture, and at dusk I glanced out and saw a fox with it in her mouth. “Hugh,” I called, “come look.”

At the sound of my voice, the fox—most certainly the Carol I’d been hearing about—returned the bone to the ground, the way you might if you were caught trying to shoplift something. “I was just…seeing how…heavy this was,” she seemed to say, before taking off.